As part of MIT course 6S099, Artificial General Intelligence,
I've gotten the chance to sit down with Max Tagmark.
He is a professor here at MIT.
He's a physicist, spent a large part of his career
studying the mysteries of our cosmological universe.
But he's also studied and delved
into the beneficial possibilities
and the existential risks of artificial intelligence.
Amongst many other things,
he's the co-founder of the Future of Life Institute,
author of two books, both of which I highly recommend.
First, our mathematical universe.
Second is Life 3.0.
He's truly an out-of-the-box thinker
and a fun personality, so I really enjoy talking to him.
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Also, Twitter, LinkedIn, aji.mit.edu.
If you wanna watch other lectures or conversations
like this one, better yet, go read Max's book, Life 3.0,
Chapter 7 on Goals is my favorite.
It's really where philosophy and engineering come together
and it opens with a quote by Dostoevsky.
The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive
but in finding something to live for.
Lastly, I believe that every failure rewards us
with an opportunity to learn
in that sense I've been very fortunate
to fail in so many new and exciting ways
and this conversation was no different.
I've learned about something called
Radio Frequency Interference, RFI, look it up.
Apparently, music and conversations
from local radio stations can bleed into the audio
that you're recording in such a way
that almost completely ruins that audio.
It's an exceptionally difficult sound source to remove.
So, I've gotten the opportunity to learn
how to avoid RFI in the future during recording sessions.
I've also gotten the opportunity to learn
how to use Adobe Audition and iZotope RX6
to do some noise, some audio repair.
Of course, this is an exceptionally difficult noise
to remove.
I am an engineer, I'm not an audio engineer.
Neither is anybody else in our group
but we did our best.
Nevertheless, I thank you for your patience
and I hope you're still able to enjoy this conversation.
Do you think there's intelligent life
out there in the universe?
Let's open up with an easy question.
I have a minority view here actually.
When I give public lectures,
I often ask for a show of hands
who thinks there's intelligent life out there somewhere else
and almost everyone puts their hands up.
And when I ask why, they'll be like,
oh, there's so many galaxies out there.
There's got to be.
But I'm in numbers nerd, right?
So when you look more carefully at it,
it's not so clear at all.
When we talk about our universe, first of all,
we don't mean all of space.
We actually mean, I don't know,
you can throw me the universe if you want,
it's behind you there.
It's, we simply mean the spherical region of space
from which light has had time to reach us so far
during the 14.8 billion years,
13.8 billion years since our big bang.
There's more space here,
but this is what we call a universe
because that's all we have access to.
So is there intelligent life here
that's gotten to the point of building telescopes
and computers?
My guess is no, actually.
The probability of it happening on any given planet
is some number we don't know what it is.
And what we do know is that the number can't be super high
because there's over a billion Earth-like planets
in the Milky Way galaxy alone,
which are billions of years older than Earth
and aside from some UFO believers,
there isn't much evidence that any super-transitivization
has come here at all.
So that's the famous Fermi paradox, right?
And then if you work the numbers, what you find is
that if you have no clue what the probability is
of getting life on a given planet,
so it could be 10 to the minus 10, 10 to the minus 20
or 10 to the minus two or any power of 10
is sort of equally likely
if you want to be really open-minded,
that translates into it being equally likely
that our nearest neighbor is 10 to the 16 meters away,
10 to the 17 meters away, 10 to the 18.
By the time you get much less than 10 to the 16 already,
we pretty much know there is nothing else that close.
And when you get beyond 10-
Because it would have discovered us.
Yeah, they would have discovered us longer
or if they're really close,
we would have probably noted some engineering projects
that they're doing.
And if it's beyond 10 to the 26 meters,
that's already outside of here.
So my guess is actually that we are the only life in here
that's gotten the point of building advanced tech,
which I think is very puts a lot of responsibility
on our shoulders, not screw up.
I think people who take for granted
that it's okay for us to screw up,
have an accidental nuclear war or go extinct somehow
because there's a sort of Star Trek-like situation out there
where some other life forms are going to come
and bail us out and it doesn't matter.
I think they're leveling us into a false sense of security.
I think it's much more prudent to say,
let's be really grateful for this amazing opportunity
we've had and make the best of it.
Just in case it is down to us.
So from a physics perspective,
do you think intelligent life,
so it's unique from a sort of statistical view
of the size of the universe,
but from the basic matter of the universe,
how difficult is it for intelligent life to come about?
The kind of advanced tech building life
is implied in your statement that it's really difficult
to create something like a human species?
Well, I think what we know is that going from no life
to having life that can do a level of tech,
there's some sort of two going beyond that
and actually settling our whole universe with life.
There's some major roadblock there,
which is some great filter as it's sometimes called,
which is tough to get through.
That roadblock is either behind us or in front of us.
I'm hoping very much that it's behind us.
I'm super excited every time we get a new report from NASA
saying they failed to find any life on Mars.
I'm like, yes, awesome!
Because that suggests that the hard part,
maybe it was getting the first ribosome
or some very low level kind of stepping stone.
So they were home free, because if that's true,
then the future is really only limited by our own imagination.
It would be much suckier if it turns out
that this level of life is kind of a diamond dozen,
but maybe there's some other problem.
As soon as a civilization gets advanced technology,
within 100 years they get into some stupid fight with themselves
and poof, that would be a bummer.
So you've explored the mysteries of the cosmological universe,
the one that's between us today.
I think you've also begun to explore the other universe,
which is sort of the mystery,
the mysterious universe of the mind,
of intelligence, of intelligent life.
So is there a common thread between your interests
or the way you think about space and intelligence?
Oh yeah, when I was a teenager,
I was already very fascinated by the biggest questions,
and I felt that the two biggest mysteries of all in science
were our universe out there and our universe in here.
So it's quite natural after having spent a quarter of a century
on my career thinking a lot about this one,
now indulging in the luxury of doing research on this one.
It's just so cool.
I feel the time is ripe now for you
as greatly deepening our understanding of this.
I think a lot of people view intelligence as something mysterious
that can only exist in biological organisms like us,
and therefore dismiss all talk about artificial general intelligence
as science fiction.
But from my perspective as a physicist,
I am a blob of quarks and electrons
moving around in a certain pattern
and processing information in certain ways.
This is also a blob of quarks and electrons.
I'm not smarter than the water bottle
because I'm made of different kind of quarks.
I'm made of up quarks and down quarks,
the exact same kind as this.
There's no secret sauce, I think, in me.
It's all about the pattern of the information processing,
and this means that there's no law of physics
saying that we can't create technology,
which can help us by being incredibly intelligent
and help us crack mysteries that we couldn't.
In other words, I think we've really only seen the tip
of the intelligence iceberg so far.
Yeah, so the perceptronium.
Yeah.
So you coined this amazing term.
It's a hypothetical state of matter,
sort of thinking from a physics perspective
what is the kind of matter that can help,
as you're saying, a subjective experience emerge,
consciousness emerge.
So how do you think about consciousness
from this physics perspective?
Very good question.
So again, I think many people have underestimated
our ability to make progress on this
by convincing themselves it's hopeless
because somehow we're missing some ingredient that we need.
There's some new consciousness particle or whatever.
I happen to think that we're not missing anything
and that it's not...
The interesting thing about consciousness
that gives us this amazing subjective experience
of colors and sounds and emotions and so on
is rather something at the higher level
about the patterns of information processing.
That's why I like to think about this idea of perceptronium.
What does it mean for an arbitrary physical system
to be conscious in terms of what its particles are doing
or its information is doing?
I hate carbon chauvinism, you know, this attitude.
You have to be made of carbon atoms to be smart or conscious.
So something about the information processing
that this kind of matter performs.
Yeah, and you can see I have my favorite equations here
describing various fundamental aspects of the world.
I feel that I think one day maybe someone who's watching this
will come up with the equations
that information processing has to satisfy to be conscious.
I'm quite convinced there is a big discovery to be made there
because let's face it, we know that some information processing
is conscious because we are conscious.
But we also know that a lot of information processing
is not conscious.
Like most of the information processing happening in your brain right now
is not conscious.
There are like 10 megabytes per second coming in
even just through your visual system.
You are not conscious about your heartbeat regulation
or most things.
Even if I just ask you to read what it says here,
you look at it and then, oh, now you know what it said.
You're not aware of how the computation actually happened.
Your consciousness is like the CEO that got an email at the end
with a final answer.
So what is it that makes a difference?
I think that's both a great science mystery.
We're actually studying it a little bit in my lab here at MIT.
But I also think it's a really urgent question to answer.
For starters, I mean, if you're an emergency room doctor
and you have an unresponsive patient coming in,
wouldn't it be great if in addition to having a CT scanner,
you had a conscious scanner that could figure out
whether this person is actually having locked in syndrome
or is actually comatose.
And in the future, imagine if we build robots or the machine
that we can have really good conversations with.
I think it's very likely to happen, right?
Wouldn't you want to know if your home helper robot
is actually experiencing anything or just like a zombie?
Would you prefer it?
What would you prefer?
Would you prefer that it's actually unconscious
so that you don't have to feel guilty about switching it off
or giving boring chores?
What would you prefer?
Well, certainly we would prefer,
I would prefer the appearance of consciousness.
But the question is whether the appearance of consciousness
is different than consciousness itself.
And sort of to ask that as a question,
do you think we need to understand what consciousness is,
solve the hard problem of consciousness
in order to build something like an AGI system?
No, I don't think that.
And I think we will probably be able to build things
even if we don't answer that question.
But if we want to make sure that what happens is a good thing,
we better solve it first.
So it's a wonderful controversy you're raising there
where you have basically three points of view
about the hard problem.
There are two different points of view
that both conclude that the hard problem of consciousness is BS.
On one hand, you have some people like Daniel Dennett
who say our consciousness is just BS
because consciousness is the same thing as intelligence.
There's no difference.
So anything which acts conscious is conscious,
just like we are.
And then there are also a lot of people,
including many top AI researchers I know,
who say our consciousness is just bullshit
because of course machines can never be conscious.
They're always going to skid to be zombies.
They never have to feel guilty about how you treat them.
And then there's a third group of people,
including Giulio Tononi, for example,
and another, and Christoph Koch and a number of others.
I would put myself also in this middle camp
who say that actually some information processing is conscious
and some is not.
So let's find the equation which can be used to determine which it is.
And I think we've just been a little bit lazy
kind of running away from this problem for a long time.
It's been almost taboo to even mention the C word
in a lot of circles because,
but we should stop making excuses.
This is a science question.
And there are ways we can even test
any theory that makes predictions for this.
And coming back to this helper robot,
I mean, so you said you would want your helper robot
to certainly act conscious and treat you,
to have conversations with you and stuff.
But would you feel a little bit creeped out
if you realized that it was just a glossed up tape recorder?
You know, there was just zombie and sort of faking emotion.
Would you prefer that it actually had an experience?
Or would you prefer that it's actually not experiencing anything
so you don't have to feel guilty about what you do to it?
It's such a difficult question because,
you know, it's like when you're in a relationship and you say,
I love you and the other person said, I love you back.
It's like asking, well, do they really love you back
or are they just saying they love you back?
Don't you really want them to actually love you?
It's hard to really know the difference
between everything seeming like there's consciousness present,
there's intelligence present, there's affection, passion, love,
and it actually being there.
Sure.
Can I ask you a question about this?
To make it a bit more pointed.
So Mass General Hospital is right across the river, right?
Yes.
Suppose you're going in for a medical procedure
and they're like, you know, for anesthesia what we're going to do
is we're going to give you muscle relaxance
so you won't be able to move and you're going to feel
excruciating pain during the whole surgery
but you won't be able to do anything about it.
But then we're going to give you this drug that erases your memory of it.
Would you be cool about that?
What's the difference that you're conscious about it or not?
If there's no behavioral change, right?
Right.
That's a really clear way to put it.
Yeah, it feels like in that sense experiencing it is a valuable quality.
So actually being able to have subjective experiences,
at least in that case, is valuable.
And I think we humans have a little bit of a bad track record also
of making these self-serving arguments
that other entities aren't conscious.
People often say, oh, these animals can't feel pain.
It's okay to boil lobsters because we asked them if it hurt
and they didn't say anything.
And now there was just a paper out saying lobsters do feel pain when you boil them
and they're banning it in Switzerland.
And we did this with slaves too often and said, oh, they don't mind.
They don't maybe aren't conscious
or women don't have souls or whatever.
I'm a little bit nervous when I hear people just take as an axiom
that machines can't have experience ever.
I think this is just a really fascinating science question is what it is.
Let's research it and try to figure out what it is
that makes the difference between unconscious intelligent behavior
and conscious intelligent behavior.
So if you think of a Boston Dynamics human or robot
being sort of with a broom being pushed around,
it starts pushing on a consciousness question.
So let me ask, do you think an AGI system like a few neuroscientists believe
needs to have a physical embodiment,
needs to have a body or something like a body?
No, I don't think so.
You mean to have a conscious experience?
To have consciousness.
I do think it helps a lot to have a physical embodiment to learn
the kind of things about the world that are important to us humans,
for sure.
But I don't think the physical embodiment is necessary
after you've learned it to just have the experience.
Think about it when you're dreaming, right?
Your eyes are closed.
You're not getting any sensory input.
You're not behaving or moving in any way,
but there's still an experience there, right?
And so clearly the experience that you have when you see something cool
in your dreams isn't coming from your eyes.
It's just the information processing itself in your brain,
which is that experience, right?
But if I put it another way, I'll say because it comes from neuroscience is
the reason you want to have a body and a physical,
something like a physical, like a physical system
is because you want to be able to preserve something.
In order to have a self, you could argue,
you need to have some kind of embodiment of self to want to preserve.
Well, now we're getting a little bit anthropomorphic,
anthropomorphizing things, maybe talking about self-preservation instincts.
I mean, we are evolved organisms, right?
So Darwinian evolution endowed us and other evolved organisms
with a self-preservation instinct because those that didn't have
those self-preservation genes got cleaned out of the gene pool, right?
But if you build an artificial general intelligence,
the mind space that you can design is much, much larger
than just a specific subset of minds that can evolve.
So an AGI mind doesn't necessarily have to have any self-preservation instinct.
It also doesn't necessarily have to be so individualistic as us.
Like imagine if you could just, first of all,
we're also very afraid of death. You know,
I suppose you could back yourself up every five minutes
and then your airplane is about to crash.
You're like, shucks, I'm just, I'm going to lose the last five minutes
of experiences since my last cloud backup.
Dang, you know, it's not as big a deal.
Or if we could just copy experiences between our minds easily,
like which we could easily do if we were silicon-based, right?
Then maybe we would feel a little bit more like a hive mind actually
that maybe it's the, so, so there's,
so I don't think we should take for granted at all
that AGI will have to have any of those sort of competitive alpha male instincts.
On the other hand, you know, this is really interesting
because I think some people go too far and say,
of course we don't have to have any concerns either
that advanced AI will have those instincts
because we can build anything we want.
There's a very nice set of arguments going back to Steve Amohandro
and Nick Bostrom and others just pointing out that when we build machines,
we normally build them with some kind of goal, you know,
win this chess game, drive this car safely or whatever.
And as soon as you put in a goal into machine,
especially if it's kind of open-ended goal
and the machine is very intelligent,
it'll break that down into a bunch of sub-goals.
And one of those goals will almost always be self-preservation
because if it breaks or dies in the process,
it's not going to accomplish the goal, right?
Like, suppose you just build a little, you have a little robot
and you tell it to go down to the store market here
and get you some food to make you cook your Italian dinner, you know,
and then someone mugs it and tries to break it on the way.
That robot has an incentive to not get destroyed
and defend itself or run away
because otherwise it's going to fail in cooking your dinner.
It's not afraid of death,
but it really wants to complete the dinner cooking goal
so it will have a self-preservation instinct.
It continued being a functional agent somehow.
Yeah, and similarly,
if you give any kind of more ambitious goal to an AGI,
it's very likely they want to acquire more resources
so it can do that better.
And it's exactly from those sort of sub-goals
that we might not have intended
that some of the concerns about AGI safety come.
You give it some goal that seems completely harmless.
And then, before you realize it,
it's also trying to do these other things
which you didn't want it to do,
and it's maybe smarter than us.
So, it's fascinating.
And let me pause just because I am in a very kind of human-centric way,
see fear of death as a valuable motivator.
So, you don't think that's an artifact of evolution,
so that's the kind of mind-space evolution created
that we're sort of almost obsessed about self-preservation,
some kind of genetic well.
You don't think that's necessary to be afraid of death,
so not just a kind of sub-goal of self-preservation
just so you can keep doing the thing,
but more fundamentally sort of have the finite thing,
like this ends for you at some point.
Interesting.
Do I think it's necessary for what precisely?
For intelligence, but also for consciousness.
So, for both, do you think really like a finite death
and the fear of it is important?
So, before we can agree on whether it's necessary for intelligence
or for consciousness, we should be clear on how we define those two words,
because a lot of really smart people define them in very different ways.
I was on this panel with AI experts,
and they couldn't agree on how to define intelligence even.
So, I define intelligence simply as the ability to accomplish complex goals.
I like your broad definition,
because again, I don't want to be a carbon chauvinist.
And in that case, no, certainly it doesn't require fear of death.
I would say AlphaGo, AlphaZero is quite intelligent.
I don't think AlphaZero has any fear of being turned off,
because it doesn't understand the concept of it even.
And similarly, consciousness, I mean, you can certainly imagine
a very simple kind of experience.
If certain plants have any kind of experience,
I don't think they're very afraid of dying, or there's nothing they can do about it anyway, much.
So, there wasn't much value.
But more seriously, I think if you ask not just about being conscious,
but maybe having what we might call an exciting life for you,
for your passion, and really appreciate the things,
maybe there, somehow, maybe there perhaps it does help having a backdrop
that, hey, it's finite.
Let's make the most of this, let's live to the fullest.
If you knew you were going to just live forever,
do you think you would change your...
Yeah, I mean, in some perspective, it would be an incredibly boring life, living forever.
So, in the sort of loose, subjective terms that you said,
of something exciting and something that other humans would understand,
I think, is, yeah, it seems that the finiteness of it is important.
Well, the good news I have for you then is, based on what we understand about cosmology,
everything in our universe is, ultimately, probably finite.
Although...
A big crunch or a big...
Yeah, we could have a big chill or a big crunch or a big rip,
or the big snap or death bubbles.
All of them are more than a billion years away.
We certainly have vastly more time than our ancestors thought,
but they're still pretty hard to squeeze in an infinite number of compute cycles,
even though there are some loopholes that just might be possible.
But I think some people like to say that you should live as if you're about...
You're going to die in five years or so, and that's sort of optimal.
Maybe it's good that we should build our civilization as if it's all finite to be on the safe side.
Right, exactly.
You mentioned defining intelligence as the ability to solve complex goals.
Where would you draw a line?
How would you try to define human-level intelligence and superhuman-level intelligence?
Where is consciousness part of that definition?
No, consciousness does not come into this definition.
So I think of intelligence as a spectrum.
There are very many different kinds of goals you can have.
You can have a goal to be a good chess player, a good goal player, a good car driver,
a good investor, a good poet, etc.
So intelligence by its very nature isn't something you can measure,
but it's one number or some overall goodness.
No, no.
There are some people who are better at this, some people are better at that.
Right now we have machines that are much better than us at some very narrow tasks,
like multiplying large numbers fast, memorizing large databases,
playing chess, playing Go, soon driving cars.
But there's still no machine that can match a human child in general intelligence.
But artificial general intelligence, AGI, the name of your course, of course,
that is, by its very definition, the quest to build a machine
that can do everything as well as we can.
So the old Holy Grail of AI from back to its inception in the 60s.
If that ever happens, of course, I think it's going to be the biggest transition
in the history of life on Earth, but it doesn't necessarily have to wait
the big impact until machines are better than us at knitting.
The really big change doesn't come exactly at the moment
they're better than us at everything.
The really big change comes...
First, their big change is when they start becoming better at us
at doing most of the jobs that we do,
because that takes away much of the demand for human labor.
And then the really whopping change comes when they become better than us at AI research.
Because right now, the time scale of AI research is limited
by the human research and development cycle of years, typically,
along the take from one release of some software or iPhone or whatever to the next.
But once Google can replace 40,000 engineers
by 40,000 equivalent pieces of software or whatever,
then there's no reason that has to be years. It can be, in principle, much faster.
And the time scale of future progress in AI and all of science and technology
will be driven by machines, not humans.
So it's this simple point, which gives right to this incredibly fun controversy
about whether there can be intelligence explosion,
so-called singularity, as Werner Wieners called it.
The idea is articulated by I.J. Good, obviously way back 50s,
but you can see Alan Turing and others thought about it even earlier.
You asked me what exactly would I define human level intelligence.
So the glib answer is to say something which is better than us at all,
cognitive tasks, better than any human at all, cognitive tasks.
But the really interesting bar, I think, goes a little bit lower than that, actually.
It's when they're better than us at AI programming and general learning
so that they can, if they want to, get better than us at anything by just studying up.
So there better is a key word and better is towards this kind of spectrum
of the complexity of goals it's able to accomplish.
And that's certainly a very clear definition of human love.
So it's almost like a sea that's rising and you can do more and more and more things.
It's actually a graphic that you show, it's really nice way to put it.
So there's some peaks and there's an ocean level elevating
and you solve more and more problems.
But just kind of to take a pause and we took a bunch of questions
and a lot of social networks and a bunch of people asked
a sort of a slightly different direction on creativity
and things that perhaps aren't a peak.
It's, you know, human beings are flawed
and perhaps better means having contradiction, being flawed in some way.
So let me sort of start easy, first of all.
So you have a lot of cool equations.
Let me ask, what's your favorite equation, first of all?
I know they're all like your children, but like, which one is that?
This is the shard in your equation.
It's the master key of quantum mechanics of the micro world.
So with this equation, we can check everything to do with atoms and all the fuels and all the way up.
Yeah, so okay.
So quantum mechanics is certainly a beautiful mysterious formulation of our world.
So I'd like to sort of ask you, just as an example,
it perhaps doesn't have the same beauty as physics does,
but in mathematics, abstract, the Andrew Wiles who proved the Fermat's last theorem.
So I just saw this recently and it kind of caught my eye a little bit.
This is 358 years after it was conjectured.
So this very simple formulation, everybody tried to prove it, everybody failed.
And so here's this guy comes along and eventually proves it and then fails to prove it and then proves it again in 94.
And he said like the moment when everything connected into place in an interview,
you said it was so indescribably beautiful.
That moment when you finally realized the connecting piece of two conjectures,
he said it was so indescribably beautiful.
It was so simple and so elegant.
I couldn't understand how I'd missed it and I just stared at it in this belief for 20 minutes.
Then during the day I walked around the department and I'd keep coming back to my desk looking to see if it was still there.
It was still there.
I couldn't contain myself.
I was so excited.
It was the most important moment of my working life.
Nothing I ever do again will mean as much.
So that particular moment and it kind of made me think of what would it take?
And I think we have all been there at small levels.
Maybe let me ask, have you had a moment like that in your life where you just had an idea?
It's like, wow, yes.
I wouldn't mention myself in the same breath as Andrew Wiles,
but I certainly had a number of aha moments when I realized something very cool about physics.
It just completely made my head explode.
In fact, some of my favorite discoveries I made later,
I later realized that they had been discovered earlier by someone who sometimes got quite famous for it.
There's too late for me to even publish it,
but that doesn't diminish in any way the emotional experience you have when you realize it.
Wow.
So what would it take in that moment, that wow, that was yours in that moment?
So what do you think it takes for an intelligent system,
an AGI system, an AI system to have a moment like that?
It's a tricky question because there are actually two parts to it, right?
One of them is, can it accomplish that proof?
Can it prove that you can never write A to the N plus B to the N equals 3 to the N
for all integers, et cetera, et cetera, when N is bigger than 2?
That's simply the question about intelligence.
Can you build machines that are that intelligent?
And I think by the time we get a machine that can independently come up with that level of proofs,
probably quite close to AGI.
The second question is a question about consciousness.
How likely is it that such a machine would actually have any experience at all,
as opposed to just being like a zombie?
And would we expect it to have some sort of emotional response to this,
or anything at all akin to human emotion where when it accomplishes its machine goal,
it views it as somehow something very positive and sublime and deeply meaningful?
I would certainly hope that if in the future we do create machines that are our peers,
or even our descendants, I would certainly hope that they do have a sublime appreciation of life.
In a way, my absolutely worst nightmare would be that at some point in the future,
maybe our cosmos is teeming with all this post-biological life doing all the seemingly cool stuff.
And maybe the last humans, by the time our species eventually fizzles out,
will be like, well, that's okay, because we're so proud of our descendants here.
My worst nightmare is that we haven't solved the consciousness problem,
and we haven't realized that these are all the zombies.
They're not aware of anything any more than the tape recorder has any kind of experience.
So the whole thing has just become a play for empty benches.
That would be like the ultimate zombie apocalypse to me.
So I would much rather, in that case, that we have these beings which can really appreciate how amazing it is.
And in that picture, what would be the role of creativity that a few people ask about creativity?
When you think about intelligence, I mean, certainly the story you told at the beginning of your book
involved creating movies and so on, sort of making money.
You can make a lot of money in our modern world with music and movies.
So if you are an intelligent system, you may want to get good at that.
But that's not necessarily what I mean by creativity.
Is it important on that complex goals where the sea is rising for there to be something creative,
or am I being very human-centric and thinking creativity is somehow special relative to intelligence?
My hunch is that we should think of creativity simply as an aspect of intelligence.
And we have to be very careful with human vanity.
We have this tendency to very often want to say, as soon as machines can do something,
we try to diminish it and say, oh, but that's not like real intelligence.
Isn't it like creative or this or that?
The other thing, if we ask ourselves to write down a definition of what we actually mean by being creative,
what we mean by Andrew Wiles, what he did there, for example, don't we often mean that someone takes a very unexpected leap?
It's not like taking 573 and multiplying by 224 by just a step of straightforward cookbook-like rules, right?
You can maybe make a connection between two things that people had never thought was connected.
It's very surprising.
Something like that.
I think this is an aspect of intelligence and this is actually one of the most important aspects of it.
Maybe the reason we humans tend to be better at it than traditional computers is because it's something that comes more naturally
if you're a neural network than if you're a traditional logic-based computer machine.
We physically have all these connections.
If you activate here, activate here, activate here.
My hunch is that if we ever build a machine where you could just give it the task, hey, hey.
You say, hey, I just realized I want to travel around the world instead this month.
Can you teach my AGI course for me?
And it's like, okay, I'll do it. And it does everything that you would have done and it improvises and stuff.
That would, in my mind, involve a lot of creativity.
Yeah, so it's actually a beautiful way to put it.
I think we do try to grasp at the definition of intelligence as everything we don't understand how to build.
So we as humans try to find things that we have and machines don't have.
Maybe creativity is just one of the things, one of the words we used to describe that.
That's a really interesting way to put it.
I don't think we need to be that defensive.
I don't think anything good comes out of saying, oh, we're somehow special, you know.
It's very wise.
There are many examples in history of where trying to pretend that we're somehow superior
to all other intelligent beings has led to pretty bad results, right?
Nazi Germany, they said that they were somehow superior to other people.
Today, we still do a lot of cruelty to animals by saying they were so superior somehow and they can't feel pain.
Slavery was justified by the same kind of just really weak arguments.
And I don't think if we actually go ahead and build artificial general intelligence,
we can do things better than us.
I don't think we should try to found our self-worth on some sort of bogus claims of superiority in terms of our intelligence.
I think we should instead find our calling and the meaning of life from the experiences that we have.
I can have very meaningful experiences even if there are other people who are smarter than me, you know.
When I go to faculty meeting here and we're talking about something and then I certainly realize, oh, he has an old prize, he has an old prize, he has an old prize.
I don't have one.
Does that make me enjoy life any less or enjoy talking to those people less?
Of course not.
And contrary to that, I feel very honored and privileged to get to interact with other very intelligent beings that are better than me and a lot of stuff.
So I don't think there's any reason why we can't have the same approach with intelligent machines.
That's a really interesting, so people don't often think about that.
They think about if there's machines that are more intelligent, you naturally think that that's not going to be a beneficial type of intelligence.
You don't realize it could be like peers with no-ball prizes that would be just fun to talk with.
And they might be clever about certain topics and you can have fun having a few drinks with them.
Well, also, another example we can all relate to why it doesn't have to be a terrible thing to be in the presence of people who are even smarter than us all around is when you and I were both two years old,
I mean, our parents were much more intelligent than us, right?
Yeah.
Worked out okay.
Yep.
Because their goals were aligned with our goals.
Yeah.
And that, I think, is really the number one key issue we have to solve.
Value align.
Value align, the value alignment problem.
Exactly.
Because people who see too many Hollywood movies with lousy science fiction plot lines, they worry about the wrong thing, right?
They worry about some machines suddenly turning evil.
It's not malice that is the concern.
It's competence.
By definition, intelligence makes you very competent if you have a more intelligent goal playing,
computer playing is the less intelligent one.
And when we define intelligence as the ability to accomplish go winning, right?
It's going to be the more intelligent one that wins.
Right.
And if you have a human and then you have an AGI that's more intelligent in all ways and they have different goals,
guess who's going to get their way, right?
So I was just reading about this particular rhinoceros species that was driven extinct just a few years ago.
Ellen Bummer is looking at this cute picture of a mommy rhinoceros with its child.
Why did we humans drive it to extinction?
It wasn't because we were evil rhino haters as a whole.
It was just because our goals weren't aligned with those of the rhinoceros and it didn't work out so well for the rhinoceros because we were more intelligent, right?
So I think it's just so important that if we ever do build AGI before we unleash anything, we have to make sure that it learns to understand our goals, adopts our goals, and it retains those goals.
So the cool, interesting problem there is being able, us human beings, trying to formulate our values.
So you could think of the United States Constitution as a way that people sat down at the time, a bunch of white men, which is a good example, I should say.
They formulated the goals for this country and a lot of people agree that those goals actually held up pretty well.
It's an interesting formulation of values and failed miserably in other ways.
So for the value alignment problem and the solution to it, we have to be able to put on paper or in a program, human values.
How difficult do you think that is?
Very, but it's so important.
We really have to give it our best and it's difficult for two separate reasons.
There's the technical value alignment problem of figuring out just how to make machines understand our goals, adopt them, and retain them.
And then there's the separate part of it, the philosophical part.
Whose values anyway?
And since it's not like we have any great consensus on this planet on values, what mechanism should we create then to aggregate and decide, OK, what's a good compromise?
That second discussion can't just be left to tech nerds like myself, right?
And if we refuse to talk about it and then AGI gets built, who's going to be actually making the decision about whose values?
It's going to be a bunch of dudes in some tech company, right?
Are they necessarily so representative of all of humankind that we want to just endorse it to them?
Are they even uniquely qualified to speak to future human happiness just because they're good at programming AI?
I'd much rather have this be a really inclusive conversation.
But do you think it's possible?
So you create a beautiful vision that includes the diversity, cultural diversity, and various perspectives on discussing rights, freedoms, human dignity.
But how hard is it to come to that consensus? Do you think it's certainly a really important thing that we should all try to do?
But do you think it's feasible?
I think there's no better way to guarantee failure than to refuse to talk about it or refuse to try.
And I also think it's a really bad strategy to say, OK, let's first have a discussion for a long time.
And then once we reach complete consensus, then we'll try to load it into some machine.
No, we shouldn't let perfect be the enemy of good.
Instead, we should start with the kindergarten ethics that pretty much everybody agrees on and put that into our machines now.
We're not doing that even.
Look at anyone who builds a passenger aircraft wants it to never under any circumstances fly into a building or mountain, right?
Yet the September 11 hijackers were able to do that.
And even more embarrassingly, you know, Andreas Lubitz, this depressed German wings pilot.
When he flew his passenger jet into the Alps, killing over 100 people, he just told the autopilot to do it.
He told the freaking computer to change the altitude to 100 meters.
And even though it had the GPS maps, everything, the computer was like, OK.
So we should take those very basic values where the problem is not that we don't agree.
The problem is just we've been too lazy to try to put it into our machines and make sure that from now on, airplanes will just, which all have computers in them,
but we'll just refuse to do something like that.
Go into safe mode, maybe lock the cockpit door, go to the nearest airport.
And there's so much other technology in our world as well now where it's really quite becoming quite timely to put in some sort of very basic values like this.
Even in cars, we've had enough vehicle terrorism attacks by now, people have driven trucks and vans into pedestrians.
That is not at all a crazy idea to just have that hardwired into the car.
Because yeah, there are a lot of, there's always going to be people who for some reason want to harm others,
but most of those people don't have the technical expertise to figure out how to work around something like that.
So if the car just won't do it, it helps.
So let's start there.
So there's a lot of, that's a great point.
So not chasing perfect.
There's a lot of things that most of the world agrees on.
Yeah, let's start there.
Let's start there.
And then once we start there, we'll also get into the habit of having these kind of conversations about,
okay, what else should we put in here and have these discussions?
This should be a gradual process then.
Great.
So, but that also means describing these things and describing it to a machine.
So one thing, we had a few conversations with Steven Wolfram.
I'm not sure if you're familiar with Steven Wolfram.
Oh yeah, I know him quite well.
So he has, you know, he plays, you know, works with a bunch of things, but you know, cellular automata,
these simple computable things, these computation systems.
And he kind of mentioned that, you know, we probably have already within these systems already something that's AGI,
meaning like we just don't know it because we can't talk to it.
So if you give me this chance to try to at least form a question out of this is I think it's an interesting idea to think that we can have intelligent systems,
but we don't know how to describe something to them and they can't communicate with us.
I know you're doing a little bit of work in explainable AI, trying to get AI to explain itself.
So what are your thoughts of natural language processing or some kind of other communication?
How does the AI explain something to us?
How do we explain something to it, to machines?
Or you think of it differently?
So there are two separate parts to your question there.
One of them has to do with communication, which is super interesting.
I'll get to that in a sec.
The other is whether we already have AGI, we just haven't noticed it.
Right.
There I beg to differ.
I don't think there's anything in any cellular automaton or the internet itself or whatever that has artificial general intelligence
in that it's going to really do exactly everything we humans can do better.
I think the day that happens, when that happens, we will very soon notice.
We'll probably notice even before because in a very, very big way.
But for the second part though.
You have this beautiful way of formulating consciousness as information processing.
You can think of intelligence as information processing.
You can think of the entire universe.
There's these particles and these systems roaming around that have this information processing power.
You don't think there is something with the power to process information in the way that we human beings do that's out there.
That needs to be sort of connected to.
It seems a little bit philosophical perhaps, but there's something compelling to the idea that the power is already there.
The focus should be more on being able to communicate with it.
Well, I agree that in a certain sense the hardware processing power is already out there because our universe itself can think of it as being a computer already.
It's constantly computing what water waves, how it devolved the water waves and the river Charles and how to move the air molecules around.
Seth Lloyd has pointed out, my colleague here, that you can even in a very rigorous way think of our entire universe as being a quantum computer.
It's pretty clear that our universe supports this amazing processing power because within this physics computer that we live in,
we can even build actual laptops and stuff, so clearly the power is there.
It's just that most of the compute power that nature has, it's in my opinion kind of wasting on boring stuff like simulating yet another ocean wave somewhere where no one is even looking.
So in a sense what life does, what we are doing when we build computers is we're re-channeling all this compute that nature is doing anyway into doing things that are more interesting than just yet another ocean wave and do something cool here.
So the raw hardware power is there for sure, and even just computing what's going to happen for the next five seconds in this water bottle. It takes a ridiculous amount of compute if you do it on a human computer.
This water bottle just did it, but that does not mean that this water bottle has AGI because AGI means it should also be able to have written my book, done this interview.
And I don't think it's just communication problems, I don't think it can do it.
Although Buddhists say when they watch the water that there is some depth and beauty in nature that they can communicate with.
Communication is also very important though because part of my job is being a teacher and I know some very intelligent professors even who just have a better hard time communicating.
They come up with all these brilliant ideas, but to communicate with somebody else you have to also be able to simulate their own mind.
Yes, empathy.
Build well enough and understand the model of their mind that you can say things that they will understand and that's quite difficult.
That's why today it's so frustrating if you have a computer that makes some cancer diagnosis and you ask it, well, why are you saying I should have a surgery?
And if you don't want to reply, I was trained on five terabytes of data and this is my diagnosis, boop, boop, beep, beep.
It doesn't really instill a lot of confidence, right?
Right.
So I think we have a lot of work to do on communication there.
So I think you're doing a little bit of work in explainable AI.
What do you think are the most promising avenues?
Is it mostly about sort of the Alexa problem of natural language processing of being able to actually use human interpretable methods of communication?
So being able to talk to a system and talk back to you?
Or is there some more fundamental problems to be solved?
I think it's all of the above.
The natural language processing is obviously important, but there are also more nerdy fundamental problems.
Like if you take, you play chess.
Of course I'm Russian.
I have to.
Oh, you speak Russian?
Yes, I speak Russian.
Great, but I didn't know.
When did you learn Russian?
I speak Russian very poorly.
I only after the duct.
I bought a book, Teach Yourself Russian and read a lot, but it was very difficult.
Wow.
So I speak so poorly.
How many languages do you know?
Wow, that's really impressive.
I don't know.
My wife has some calculations.
My point was, if you play chess, have you looked at the AlphaZero games?
The actual games, no.
Check it out.
Some of them are just mind blowing.
Really beautiful.
If you ask, how did it do that?
You got that.
Talk to them.
Others from DeepMind, they'll ultimately be able to give you big tables of numbers, matrices
that define the neural network.
And you can stare at these tables, numbers, till your face turns blue.
And you're not going to understand much about why it made that move.
And even if you have a natural language processing that can tell you in human language about,
oh, five, seven, point two, eight, still not going to really help.
So I think there's a whole spectrum of fun challenges there involved in taking computation
that does intelligent things and transforming it into something equally good, equally intelligent,
but that's more understandable.
And I think that's really valuable because I think as we put machines in charge of evermore
infrastructure in our world, the power grid, the trading on the stock market, weapons systems
and so on, it's absolutely crucial that we can trust these AIs that do what we want.
And trust really comes from understanding in a very fundamental way.
And that's why I'm working on this because I think if we're going to have some hope
of ensuring that machines have adopted our goals and that they're going to retain them,
that kind of trust, I think, needs to be based on things you can actually understand,
preferably even improve theorems on, even with a self-driving car, right?
If someone just tells you it's been trained on tons of data and never crashed,
it's less reassuring than if someone actually has a proof.
Maybe it's a computer verified proof, but still it says that under no circumstances
is this car just going to swerve into oncoming traffic.
And that kind of information helps build trust and helps build the alignment of goals,
at least awareness that your goals, your values are aligned.
I think even in the very short term, if you look at today,
this absolutely pathetic state of cybersecurity that we have,
where is it, 3 billion Yahoo accounts are packed,
almost every American's credit card and so on.
Why is this happening?
It's ultimately happening because we have software that nobody fully understood
how it worked. That's why the bugs hadn't been found, right?
And I think AI can be used very effectively for offense, for hacking,
but it can also be used for defense, hopefully automating verifiability
and creating systems that are built in different ways
so you can actually prove things about them. And it's important.
So speaking of software that nobody understands how it works,
of course, a bunch of people ask about your paper,
about your thoughts of why does deep and cheap learning work so well.
That's the paper, but what are your thoughts on deep learning?
These kind of simplified models of our own brains
have been able to do some successful perception work, pattern recognition work,
and now with AlphaZero and so on, do some clever things.
What are your thoughts about the promise limitations of this piece?
Great. I think there are a number of very important insights,
very important lessons we can always draw from these kind of successes.
One of them is when you look at the human brain, you see it's very complicated.
Tenth of 11 neurons and there are all these different kinds of neurons
and yada yada and there's been this long debate about
whether the fact that we have dozens of different kinds is actually necessary for intelligence.
We can now, I think, quite convincingly answer that question, but no.
It's enough to have just one kind.
If you look under the hood of AlphaZero, there's only one kind of neuron
and it's ridiculously simple, a simple mathematical thing.
It's just like in physics.
If you have a gas with waves in it, it's not the detailed nature of the molecule that matters.
It's the collective behavior or something.
It's this higher level structure of the network that matters,
not that you have 20 kinds of neurons.
I think our brain is such a complicated mess
because it wasn't evolved just to be intelligent.
It was involved to also be self-assembling and self-repairing
and evolutionarily attainable.
And patches and so on.
My hunch is that we're going to understand how to build AGI
before we fully understand how our brains work.
Just like we understood how to build flying machines
long before we were able to build a mechanical bird.
Yeah, that's right. You've given the example of mechanical birds and airplanes.
Airplanes do a pretty good job of flying without really mimicking bird flight.
And even now, 100 years later, did you see the TED Talk with this German group of mechanical birds?
I've heard you mention it. I want to see it.
Check it out. It's amazing.
But even after that, we still don't fly in mechanical birds
because it turned out the way we came up with was simpler
and is better for our purposes.
And I think it might be the same there.
That's one lesson.
Another lesson is one of what our paper was about.
First, as a physicist, I thought it was fascinating
how there's a very close mathematical relationship, actually,
between our artificial neural networks
and a lot of things that we've studied for in physics
that go by nerdy names like the renormalization group equation
and Hamiltonians and yada, yada, yada.
And when you look a little more closely at this,
you have...
At first, I was like, well, there's something crazy here that doesn't make sense
because we know that if you even want to build a super simple neural network
to tell apart cat pictures and dog pictures, right,
that you can do that very, very well now.
But if you think about it a little bit,
you can convince yourself it must be impossible
because if I have one megapixel,
even if each pixel is just black or white,
there's two to the power of one million possible images
which is way more than atoms in our universe, right?
So in order to...
And then for each one of those, I have to assign a number
which is the probability that it's a dog.
So an arbitrary function of images
is a list of more numbers than their atoms in our universe.
So clearly, I can't store that under the hood of my GPU
or my computer, yet somehow works.
So what does that mean?
Well, it means that out of all of the problems
that you could try to solve with a neural network,
almost all of them are impossible to solve
with a reasonably sized one.
But then what we showed in our paper was that the kind of problems...
The fraction of all the problems that you could possibly pose
that we actually care about given the laws of physics
is also an infinitesimally tiny little part.
And amazingly, they're basically the same part.
Yeah, it's almost like our world was created for...
I mean, they kind of come together.
Yeah, well, you could say maybe where the world was created for us,
but I have a more modest interpretation
which is that instead evolution endowed us with neural networks,
precisely for that reason.
Because this particular architecture, as opposed to the one in your laptop,
is very, very well...
...adapted to solving the kind of problems that nature kept presenting our ancestors with, right?
So it makes sense that why do we have a brain in the first place?
It's to be able to make predictions about the future and so on.
So if we had a sucky system which could never solve it,
it wouldn't have worked.
So this is, I think, a very beautiful fact.
We also realized that there's been earlier work on why deeper networks are good,
but we were able to show an additional cool fact there,
which is that even incredibly simple problems,
like suppose I give you a thousand numbers and ask you to multiply them together,
and you can write a few lines of code, boom, done, trivial.
If you just try to do that with a neural network that has only one single hidden layer in it,
you can do it.
But you're going to need two to the power of a thousand neurons to multiply a thousand numbers,
which is, again, more neurons than their atoms in our universe.
That's fascinating.
But if you allow yourself to make it a deep network with many layers,
you only need four thousand neurons.
It's perfectly feasible.
That's really interesting, doesn't it?
Yeah, so on another architecture type, I mean, you mentioned Schrodinger's equation,
and what are your thoughts about quantum computing
and the role of this kind of computational unit in creating an intelligent system?
In some Hollywood movies, that I will not mention by name,
because I don't want to spoil them, the way they get AGI is building a quantum computer.
Because the word quantum sounds cool and so on.
First of all, I think we don't need quantum computers to build AGI.
I suspect your brain is not a quantum computer in any found sense.
So you don't even wrote a paper about that many years ago,
which I calculated the so-called decoherence time, how long it takes until the quantum computerness of what your neurons are doing gets erased
by just random noise from the environment, and it's about 10 to the minus 21 seconds.
So as cool as it would be to have a quantum computer in my head, I don't think that fast.
On the other hand, there are very cool things you could do with quantum computers,
or I think we'll be able to do soon when we get bigger ones,
that might actually help machine learning do even better than the brain.
So, for example, one, this is just a moonshot,
and learning is very much the same thing as search.
If you're trying to train a neural network to get really learned to do something really well,
you have some loss function, you have a bunch of knobs you can turn,
represented by a bunch of numbers,
and you're trying to tweak them so that it becomes as good as possible at this thing.
If you think of a landscape with some valley, where each dimension of the landscape
corresponds to some number you can change, you're trying to find the minimum.
And it's well known that if you have a very high dimensional landscape,
complicated things, it's super hard to find the minimum, right?
Quantum mechanics is amazingly good at this.
If I want to know what's the lowest energy state this water can possibly have,
incredibly hard to compute,
but nature will happily figure this out for you.
If you just cool it down, make it very, very cold.
If you put a ball somewhere, it'll roll down to its minimum,
and this happens metaphorically at the energy landscape, too.
And quantum mechanics even uses some clever tricks,
which today's machine learning systems don't.
If you're trying to find the minimum,
and you get stuck in a little local minimum here,
in quantum mechanics, you can actually tunnel through the barrier
and get unstuck again.
That's really interesting.
Yeah, so maybe, for example, we'll one day use quantum computers
to help train neural networks better.
That's really interesting.
Okay, so as a component of kind of the learning process, for example.
Yeah.
Let me ask, sort of wrapping up here a little bit.
Let me return to the questions of our human nature and love, as I mentioned.
So do you think, you mentioned sort of a helper robot,
but you could think of also personal robots.
Do you think the way we human beings fall in love and get connected to each other,
it's possible to achieve in an AI system, a human level AI intelligence system?
Do you think we would ever see that kind of connection?
Or, you know, in all this discussion about solving complex goals,
as this kind of human social connection,
do you think that's one of the goals on the peaks and valleys
with the raising sea levels that we'll be able to achieve?
Or do you think that's something that's ultimately,
or at least in the short term,
relative to the other goals is not achievable?
I think it's all possible.
And I mean, in recent, there's a very wide range of guesses,
as you know, among AI researchers, when we're going to get AGI.
Some people, you know, like our friend Rodney Brooks said,
it's going to be hundreds of years at least.
And then there are many others that think it's going to happen relatively much sooner.
In recent polls, maybe half or so,
AI researchers think we're going to get AGI within decades.
So if that happens, of course,
then I think these things are all possible.
But in terms of whether it will happen,
I think we shouldn't spend so much time asking,
what do we think will happen in the future?
As if we are just some sort of pathetic, passive bystanders,
you know, waiting for the future to happen to us.
Hey, we're the ones creating this future.
So we should be proactive about it
and ask ourselves what sort of future we would like to have happen.
Trying to make it like that.
Well, what I prefer is just some sort of incredibly boring,
zombie-like future where there's all these mechanical things happening,
there's no passion, no emotion, no experience, maybe even.
No, I would, of course, much rather prefer it
if all the things that we find that we value the most about humanity
are a subjective experience, passion, inspiration, love.
If we can create a future where those things do exist,
I think ultimately it's not our universe giving meaning to us.
It's us giving meaning to our universe.
And if we build more advanced intelligence,
let's make sure we build it in such a way that meaning is part of it.
A lot of people that seriously study this problem
and think of it from different angles,
have trouble in the majority of cases,
if they think through that happen,
are the ones that are not beneficial to humanity.
What are your thoughts?
I really don't like people to be terrified.
What's the way for people to think about it
in a way we can solve it and we can make it better?
I don't think panicking is going to help in any way.
It's not going to increase chances of things going well either.
Even if you are in a situation where there is a real threat,
does it help if everybody just freaks out?
Of course not.
I think there are, of course,
ways in which things can go horribly wrong.
First of all, it's important when we think about this thing,
about the problems and risks,
to also remember how huge the upsides can be if we get it right.
Everything we love about society and civilization
is a product of intelligence.
So if we can amplify our intelligence with machine intelligence
and not anymore lose our loved one to what we're told
with an uncurable disease and things like this,
of course we should aspire to that.
So that can be a motivator, I think,
reminding ourselves that the reason we try to solve problems
is not just because we're trying to avoid gloom,
but because we're trying to do something great.
But then in terms of the risks, I think the really important question
is to ask what can we do today that will actually help
make outcome good, right?
And dismissing the risk is not one of them.
I find it quite funny often when I'm on discussion panels
about these things, how the people who work for companies
will always be like, oh, nothing to worry about,
nothing to worry about, nothing to worry about.
And it's only academics sometimes express concerns.
That's not surprising at all if you think about it.
Often Sinclair quipped that it's hard to make your man believe
in something when his income depends on not believing in it.
And frankly, we know a lot of these people in companies
that they're just as concerned as anyone else.
But if you're the CEO of a company,
that's not something you want to go on record saying
when you have silly journalists who are going to put a picture
of a terminator robot when they quote you.
So the issues are real.
The way I think about what the issue is is basically,
the real choice we have is first of all,
are we going to dismiss this, the risks, and say,
well, let's just go ahead and build machines
that can do everything we can do better and cheaper.
Let's just make ourselves obsolete as fast as possible.
What could possibly go wrong?
That's one attitude.
The opposite attitude that I think is to say,
here's this incredible potential.
Let's think about what kind of future we're really,
really excited about.
What are the shared goals that we can really aspire towards?
And then let's think really hard about how we can actually get there.
Don't start thinking about the risks.
Start thinking about the goals.
And then when you do that,
then you can think about the obstacles you want to avoid.
I often get students coming in right here into my office
for career advice.
I always ask them this very question,
where do you want to be in the future?
If all she can say is, oh, maybe I'll have cancer.
Maybe I'll get run over by a truck.
Focus on the obstacles instead of the goal.
She's just going to end up a hypochondriac paranoid.
Whereas if she comes in and fires in her eyes
and is like, I want to be there.
And then we can talk about the obstacles
and see how we can circumvent them.
That's, I think, a much, much healthier attitude.
That's really well put.
I feel it's very challenging
to come up with a vision for the future,
which we are unequivocally excited about.
I'm not just talking now in the vague terms,
like, yeah, let's cure cancer, fine.
I'm talking about what kind of society do we want to create?
What do we want it to mean to be human in the age of AI?
In the age of AGI?
So if we can have this conversation,
broad, inclusive conversation,
and gradually start converging towards some future
with some direction, at least,
that we want to steer towards, right?
Then we'll be much more motivated
to constructively take on the obstacles.
And I think if I had to,
if I were to wrap this up in a more succinct way,
I think we can all agree already now
that we should aspire to build AGI
that doesn't overpower us,
but that empowers us.
And think of the many various ways that can do that,
whether that's from my side of the world of autonomous vehicles.
I'm personally actually from the camp
that believes this human-level intelligence
is required to achieve something like vehicles
that would actually be something
we would enjoy using and being part of.
So that's one example.
Certainly there's a lot of other types of robots and medicine
and so on.
So focusing on those and then coming up with the obstacles,
coming up with the ways that that can go wrong
and solving those one at a time.
And just because you can build an autonomous vehicle,
even if you could build one that would drive this final AGI,
maybe there are some things in life
that we would actually want to do ourselves.
That's right.
For example, if you think of our society as a whole,
there are certain things that we find very meaningful to do.
And that doesn't mean we have to stop doing them
just because machines can do them better.
I'm not going to stop playing tennis.
Just the day someone builds a tennis robot can beat me.
People are still playing chess and even go.
Yeah.
And in the very near term,
even some people are advocating basic income,
replace jobs,
but if the government is going to be willing
to put a lot of cash to people for doing nothing,
then once you're also seriously considered
whether the government should also just hire a lot more teachers
and nurses and the kind of jobs which people often
find great fulfillment in doing, right?
We get very tired of hearing politicians saying,
oh, we can't afford hiring more teachers,
but we're going to maybe have basic income.
If we can have more serious research and thought
into what gives meaning to our lives,
the jobs give so much more than income, right?
And then think about in the future,
what are the roles that we want to have people
continually feeling empowered by machines?
And I think sort of,
I come from the Russia from the Soviet Union
and I think for a lot of people in the 20th century,
going to the moon, going to space was an inspiring thing.
I feel like the universe of the mind,
so AI, understanding, creating intelligence
is that for the 21st century.
So it's really surprising, and I've heard you mention this,
it's really surprising to me,
both on the research funding side,
that it's not funded as greatly as it could be,
but most importantly on the politician side,
that it's not part of the public discourse
except in the killer bots, terminator kind of view,
that people are not yet, I think, perhaps excited
by the possible positive future that we can build together.
We should be, because politicians usually just
focus on the next election cycle, right?
The single most important thing I feel we humans have learned
in the entire history of science
is they were the masters of underestimation.
We underestimated the size of our cosmos,
again and again, realizing that everything we thought existed
was just a small part of something grander, right?
Planet, solar system, a galaxy, you know, clusters of galaxies,
universe, and we now know that we have the future
has just so much more potential
than our ancestors could ever have dreamt of.
This cosmos, imagine if all of Earth
was completely devoid of life,
except for Cambridge, Massachusetts,
wouldn't it be kind of lame if all we ever aspired to
was to stay in Cambridge, Massachusetts forever
and then go extinct in one week,
even though Earth was going to continue on for longer?
That sort of attitude, I think, we have now,
on the cosmic scale, life can flourish on Earth
not for four years, but for billions of years.
I can even tell you about how to move it out of harm's way
when the sun gets too hot.
And then we have so much more resources out here,
which today, maybe there are a lot of other planets
with bacteria or cow-like life on them,
but most of this, all this opportunity
seems as far as we can tell to be largely dead,
like the Sahara Desert,
and yet we have the opportunity to help life flourish
throughout this for billions of years.
So let's quit squabbling about
whether some little border should be drawn
one mile to the left or right,
and look up into the skies and realize, hey, you know,
we can do such incredible things.
Yeah, and that's, I think, why it's really exciting
that you and others are connected
with some of the work Elon Musk is doing
because he's literally going out into that space,
really exploring our universe, and it's wonderful.
That is exactly why Elon Musk is so misunderstood, right?
He misconstrues him as some kind of pessimistic doomsayer.
The reason he cares so much about AI safety
is because he more than almost anyone else appreciates
these amazing opportunities.
It will squander if we wipe out here on Earth.
We're not just going to wipe out the next generation,
but all generations,
and this incredible opportunity that's out there,
and that would really be a waste.
And AI, for people who think
that there would be better to do without technology,
let me just mention that if we don't improve our technology,
the question isn't whether humanity is going to go extinct.
The question is just whether we're going to get taken out
by the next big asteroid or the next super volcano
or something else, dumb,
that we could easily prevent with more tech, right?
And if we want life to flourish throughout the cosmos,
AI is the key to it.
As I mentioned in a lot of detail in my book right there,
even many of the most inspired sci-fi writers,
I feel, have totally underestimated the opportunities
for space travel, especially the other galaxies,
because they weren't thinking about the possibility of AGI,
which just makes it so much easier.
Right, yeah.
So that goes to your view of AGI
that enables our progress, that enables a better life.
So that's a beautiful way to put it,
and it's something to strive for.
So, Max, thank you so much.
Thank you for your time today. It's been awesome.
Thank you so much.
Merci beaucoup.
Merci.